An invitation to turn inwards

An update from the quiet research desk

Dear You —

In December, I wrote to you about beginning my research for the MSc CWTP¹. That letter is here.

But since then, I have been unsure about how to proceed. What is the best way to structure my letters to you about this? In what order do I share my Research Notes? A coherent structure or order has not yet revealed itself. Everything seems madly random. Yet, each seemingly random conversation, each paper I read, each reflection I compose, each fragment of creative writing I make — everything seems to come back to the following question/s:

What is the experience of beauty and ugliness in my writing? What is the experience of ugliness and beauty in the stories I tell myself about myself, about you and us, and about the world? And how is ugliness and beauty linked to my therapeutic practice?

The heuristic invitation to turn inwards first

For my research project, I’m taking a heuristic inquiry approach.

In brief, this is a qualitative research methodology that begins with an inward search to understand something about the nature of the human experience.

This quite a radical way of learning for me.

Typically, when I want to understand or know something, I try to get to an answer as quickly as possible. I don’t typically sit in silence, without answers. I don’t typically sit in the uncomfortable space of not-knowing. Do you?

I will skip ahead. I will leap over the mystery and the incoherence to find order as quickly as possible in a previously devised answer from others: the experts. I will google; I will borrow or buy books; I will listen to podcasts; I will ask Wikipedia or ChatGPT; I will call my mother.

Madly, I will do this even if I want to understand something about myself. I have my intuitions, but I don’t sit long with them. I want to check that I am not wrong. And I want to do this quickly.

A major part of my self-development project over the past few years has been to create space and silence and confidence to turn inwards first.

I still think I rush through this. And in rushing to get an answer, I miss out on listening to myself. I miss hearing, possibly, the real questions I want to ask. (And, remember, the inspiration for Metanoia Road is to ask questions, and I wrote about that here.) Also — importantly — I miss knowing that I know.

There’s a poem by Rumi that articulates this invitation to turn inwards:

What in your life is calling you,
When all the noise is silenced,
The meetings adjourned, 
The lists laid aside, 
And the wild iris blooms,
By itself
In the dark forest . . .
What still pulls your soul?

These questions are so compelling.

— What in my life is calling me? (And, dear you, what is calling you?)

— What still pulls my soul? (And, what still pulls your soul?)

I think I’ve always been asking the same questions:

— Why am I ugly? How am I ugly?

— Why am I beautiful? How am I beautiful?

And I mean ugly and beautiful in many ways — from the external and physical to the internal and moral.

Sometimes, I think I’ve always been asking these questions. And not just about me, but about you, and us, and the entire universe.

How I’ll share my research notes — randomly!

Much of the research leads me to what everyone else has said about aesthetics - so I’ve been reading everything from Plato, Aristotle, Shaftesbury and Kant to Scruton, Yanagi, Saito and Han. And in future letters, I’ll share notes about these readings.

It feels as if I am taking my first steps by starting chronologically and reading through the history of thought on beauty and aesthetics. But each paper or book I read sends me off in random directions across timelines and across fields of inquiry from philosophy to literature to psychotherapy and within those fields to music then spoken word then neuroscience.

It’s been hard for me to find a structure to communicate this research process to you. So, I’m just going to share things as they come. I’ll embrace the beautiful randomness of this process!² Hopefully, they will be interesting invitations along the way and, hopefully, we can make sense of it all somewhere down the track. Thanks, again, for accompanying me on this journey!

Starting ‘close in’ with a blank page

The important thing for now is for me to continue to turn inward.

In addition to the reading, I write. I take a blank page. I make words on it. I open myself up to the aesthetic experience of this practice. I let it be.

I am generating data by writing creatively. So far, I have fragments of what might become poems. I’ll write more about this method in future letters.

The poet David Whyte suggests that we pause before taking steps towards others and other voices. We usually think that research is the first step towards learning something. But there is a step before that. The very first step is sitting in silence and listening to yourself. For me, much of this listening is happening as I am writing on a blank page.

I am referring to David Whyte’s poem, “Start Close In”. Here is the beginning, and I have recorded the entire poem for us and attach it below.

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way to begin
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

[. . .]

The first step is to step inward. To dwell inside my own experience of the phenomenon I wish to understand. To dwell in this internal space without answers and scholarship and shoulders to stand on. To dwell simply in not knowing. Not having ready-made downloadable answers. To just be quiet. And to listen.

Here is my reading of “Start Close In”.

The radical possibility of heuristic inquiry

This poem, to me, describes the heuristic process. At the core of all heuristic discovery is “the power of tacit knowledge” — the idea that we know more than what we think we know. The idea that we know what lies beyond what we can readily observe or, even, articulate, and that tacit knowledge might be the basis of all other knowledge³.

When I first encountered the possibility of heuristic research during an MSc CWTP class, I knew this was the approach I needed to choose. It was this radical idea that I might not only have access to tacit knowledge but that this knowledge gained through my own lived experience might have some “value” or “truth” and that it could add to (or come before or exist beyond) the larger body of truths. Well, this seemed like a revelation to me.

More than being the right choice of methodology for this research project, it seemed the necessary choice for my own personal development.

Over the course of my later adult life, I noticed how much more I depended on external validation and confirmation about even the facts of my own experience, judgments and emotional responses. Somewhere along the way, I lost trust in myself. I was always checking with external sources about every single thing I thought, felt and experienced.

This heuristic invitation is an invitation towards self-trust and self-confidence — it seems essential to my continued self-development. It is also an invitation to recognise that I participate in the construction of knowledge; I don’t just receive knowledge; I collaborate, cowrite, co-construct.

I’ll end here for now. I just wanted to break the ice again! To warm up the page. To become comfortable at pressing the send button and to continue sending letters to you.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Meet me in the comments section:

I have a question for you (from Rumi). You may like to respond in any way you like: a poem, a fragment, a paragraph, a further question. What in your life is calling you/ When all the noise is silenced/ What still pulls your soul?

1. CWTP = ‘Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes’.

2. And, also, the beautiful randomness of Substack as a platform for holding space for writing that is becoming, unfolding and, even, for writing about the writing.

3. Refer to, for example, Polanyi, M (1958. New edition 2015) Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.